Happy Fun Reviewing

Great. Just great. Out of all the papers I had to review for an upcoming conference, guess which two reviews the programme committee asked me to comment on and defend further?

Correct, none of the four I refereed myself. I was asked to defend the two I sent out to subreferees. In other words, I didn't save myself any effort by farming some out to someone else. To boot, one of them had a very complicated proof in it that I got asked to check, to make sure that the conjecture really was true.

Yuck.

There's only one thing worse than struggling to prove your own conjecture true, that you just KNOW is true but the proof is escaping you, and that's struggling to prove someone else's conjecture true (even with their hints).